"They make up the heart and the thinking in the minds of those who would belong to the Ku Klux Klan," singer/activist Harry Belafonte fumed last November. "They are white supremacists. They are men of evil. They have names. ... The Koch brothers — that's their name."

The Kochs' critics are free to disagree with the Kansas industrialists and their libertarian ideas. However, most who despise the Kochs would be shocked by what these "greedy capitalists" do with their profits, beyond campaign donations.

• For starters, the Kochs support university programs and think tanks that try "to understand the nature of human freedom and how that freedom leads to prosperity," as the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) explains.

CKF underwrites research and teaching at Brown, Mount Holyoke, Sarah Lawrence, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Vassar, and some 245 other colleges. This includes a speaker series, reading group, and essay contest at the University of Nevada Las Vegas in Harry Reid's home state. Koch Industries (which offers same-sex spousal benefits to its legally married employees) also donated $814,000 to the Kansas State University Office of Diversity to assist "historically under-represented students."

• The Kochs fund cures and treatments.

David Koch survived a 1991 plane crash that killed 34 people, including everyone else in first class. He soon was diagnosed with, and then endured, prostate cancer. These challenges reinforced his passion for medical philanthropy. Among $506 million in such gifts, his major grants include: $25 million to Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to eliminate genitourinary malignancies; $100 million for cancer research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; $100 million for a new ambulatory care center at New York Presbyterian Hospital. This donation actually triggered an outbreak of mental illness among leftists who decried Koch's nine-digit check.

Elizabeth B. Koch, Charles' wife, launched the Koch Cultural Trust. It has furnished $1.8 million in grants to artists and musicians with ties to Kansas.

David Koch supports PBS' documentary series Nova. He also is a paleo-philanthropist, having given $15 million to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History for a Hall of Human Origins and another $35 million to update its fossil and dinosaur displays in Washington, D.C. New York's American Museum of Natural History will enjoy a new Dinosaur Wing, thanks to David's $20 million gift.

David also donated $100 million in 2008 to modernize the former New York State Theater at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, home to the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera.

• The Kochs also steward the environment.

"Koch Industries, Inc. takes a leadership role in the promotion of biodiversity, wildlife habitat enhancement, land restoration and conservation education," according to Wildlife Habitat Council president Robert Johnson. "Koch and its subsidiaries maintain Council-certified programs at 10 facilities throughout the United States," including Montana's 300,000-acre Matador Cattle Company Beaverhead Ranch.

Love or loathe Charles and David Koch's politics, only a liar could deny the tremendous social good that their money secures. Rather than quietly collect mansions and yachts, they spend billions to school students, cure diseases, cultivate artists, and clean the Earth.

If only Godzilla and King Kong were this philanthropic.

Deroy Murdock is a Fox news contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. He has addressed the Koch Summer Fellows Program and collaborated for decades with market-oriented non-profits that enjoy the Kochs' generosity.